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>Today's rich Florentines had rich ancestors Doesn't everybody alive today have rich ancestors? Like pretty much everyone is related to Charlemagne or Genghis

• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• tropo 10y ago
  Indeed, because the lower classes tended to die.
  • ptaipale 10y ago
    Not necessarily; just that classes mix and have always mixed (partly out of wedlock of course). When you go back, say, twelve generations, almost everyone has a few upper class ancestors among the 8190 (part of them are anyway overlapping duplicates). (FWIW, I have an ancestor 12 generations ago who was almost a nobleman, plundering Germany in 30 Years War and getting in return an estate that was tax-free for some generations, as long as the owner promised to send in a cavalryman to the Swedish king's service. But most of my ancestors were dirt-poor peasants like almost everyone was.)
• internaut 10y ago
  My (with no evidence mind) intuition always suggested to me that there is some Group Selection going on in evolutionary terms. It could be on the memetic level. I am aware the Selfish Gene debunked this. Yet the way different classes of humans relate to each other, again and again the same coincidences. There's something going on but I don't know what it is. In my country there were originally two major tribal alliances literally going back thousands of years. Today the people in the two major political parties are descended largely from those two tribes. Also largely these are disjoint sets. If there was some crossover it could be just natural selection in the way we're all related to Genghis Khan but that there are no descendants of Tribe X in Party Y suggests something else is up.